When talking about email marketing, what comes to your mind? If you are a beginner, you may have both positive and negative opinions towards it. You may think that it is all about spam mails or you may also think that it is something that carries the power to make one rich overnight! And I am sure that you have heard about it in various blogs, forums etc. So, what actually email marketing means? Let’s talk about it from a beginner’s point of view.

What is Email Marketing? Learn more here!

Before going further, I want to make it clear that this article in meant for the beginners, who wants to make money online. If you are a seasoned player in the file of make money online or affiliate marketing, your point of view will be somewhat different and you may skip this article, though I always welcome your constructive feedback.

First, what is email marketing? In simple words, it is the use of the power of electronic mail or email in order to reach a wide range of potential customers or readers when offering products and services. Simply put, it is marketing via email and it is one of the most powerful tools one can have in internet marketing.

An alternative definition of email marketing, however, is when a company continues to foster communication with existing clients in order to enhance the service being offered and the relationship in existence. These are all done with the intent of gaining customer loyalty and patronage.

Email marketing, in either definitional paradigms, aims for the end of loyalty and patronage. If email marketing were to be used on potential clients, the role that the strategy has to play is that of trying to transform readers into real clients. The same idea holds true for existing clients. If existing clients were to receive continuous check-ups and evaluation of the service offered, the perception of forwarding the satisfaction of the customers would be made even clearer.

Email marketing, of course, does not go off without any negative perception from the society. Many individuals see themselves as greatly inconvenienced by email marketing, which is at times classified as spam. However, it has come a long way since those early days of a complete and absolute negative stigma of email marketing. Now people have the right to choose what they find useful and suitable content arriving into their in-boxes.

However, in email marketing, it is important to know what rights and limitations are in existence. In the United States of America, different states revolt. Some would legislate against email marketing (which is considered spam) and others would not. That’s why in preparing and serving an email marketing campaign, you must take care not to annoy your prospects with unwanted and irrelevant emails. The legality of receiving an article of email marketing is unquestioned when the customer being serviced is that with which the company has had previous transactions with. A pre-existing business relationship may vary, but it may very well be someone from whom the company has previously requested information from, or someone who has bought or acquired the services of the company. This implies a level of consent that must be present in all the emails that will be used in email marketing campaigns.

Because of these various reasons, there are some imperative steps that must be taken by a marketer or company wishing to take part in any email marketing campaign. For example:

• Maintaining the integrity of Content: Legislation against email marketing, and marketing general, are in fact in place because in past there was many reports of abuses. Therefore, it is imperative that of some of the things considered in an email marketing campaign is that of integrity of content. This would mean the inclusion of the senders’ complete and accurate information.
• Clarity of Consent: It is imperative that companies or individuals make sure that the persons they are sending emails to are those they’ve had previous transactions with, and are in good standing with each of them. There is a necessity to keep close track to each and every email address being added to the list of clients because similarly, it would be easy to duly evaluate consent in each and every scenario.
• Aggressiveness of Content: While email marketers may want to carry on with their aggressive marketing strategies, their interests must be balanced with the rights of individuals against marketing strategies that are far too aggressive and neglect their rights and wishes. So, companies and email marketers should use subject lines that reflect content, use a valid address, and make arrangements for the recipients to opt out of the service or from receiving future notices and marketing pitches.

At the end of the day, email marketing is a powerful marketing tool that really works. It works because of its low-cost and its far-reaching capacities. However, because there are no singular restrictions as to how it may be used without going to the extent of the legal borderline behavior, companies and individuals that wish to use it in its full potency must in return expect a degree of compromise to be made, which may not endanger the reputation of the company or the brand, but may, in the long run, help build a healthy brand image.

So, that was all about email marketing in a nutshell! If you are thinking about trying email marketing to make some money online, don’t forget the points that I discussed above. Then take help from a powerful tool like Aweber and jump into real work. I am sure that soon you will become a successful email marketer. Need some more elaborate information about email marketing. Watch out for my next few articles. Old player in this field? Still trying hard to get good results? Just keep it in mind that gone are the days of tons and tons of spam mails. Instead build a good list, create some creative and powerful email marketing campaigns and see the difference.

Merry Christmas to all my readers, subscribers and advertisers. May this Christmas be bright and cheerful and may the New Year bring abundant love, joy and happiness in your life. I hope that many of you have already started to think about the goals for the next year. That’s really nice. In fact this is the right time to start something new. Set some solid goals, prepare yourself mentally and jump into practical work. And the success will be all yours. My best wishes are always with you and I know you can do it!

Once again Merry Christmas!

This week Movable Type launched a new application that would allow Movable Type Pro users to install a micro-blog on their site. Called as Motion, the application will offer many basic features of popular micro-blogging and social networking sites like Twitter and FriendFeed. With Motion, you will be able to create both public and private microblogs. It features a blog editor with which you can easily publish text, images, links, audio and embedded video. Then it comes with OpenID sign in support and integration with popular services like Flickr, YouTube and Digg. So, Motion is more a social application than a simple microblogging platform and I am sure that this is a good news for Movable Type users. What you say?

Some important features of Motion:

• Ability to post text, links, images, audio or embedded video with just a click.
• Public microblog for sharing your ideas, sentiments and other interesting stuffs with the world.
• Private microblog for aggregating and tracking interesting conversation from the web.
• Public social network to connect to your community across the web instead of using multiple social networks.
• Ability to create a private microblog community among a group of friends or employees.
• Integration with a number of popular services like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Delicious, and Digg.
• Members can show their actions from across the web and follow other members.
• Members can easily sign in with their existing account from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or any OpenID provider.

Right now Motion is in beta stage. For testing, sign up for their free demo or download the core file and host it on your own server. The official site mentioned that it will be freely available in early 2009 for all licensed users of Movable Type Pro.

Last week, popular blogging platform Blogger implemented the new Import and Export features in all of it’s blogs. With these features, you will be able to create copies of your own blogs as well as import them into other existing blogs. Until now the import and export features were available only for the Blogger in Draft users. So, if you are a Blogger.com user, you will definitely find them interesting.

Import/Export features in Blogger

What you can do with these new features? With the import and export features, you can easily perform a number of interesting tasks like merging of two or more blogs into one, moving posts from blog to blog, exporting blog to a different platform and even creating back up copies of a blog. So, the import and export features on Blogger will offer you a whole new range of portability and freedom in managing your content.

Well, currently the import feature only supports importing of Blogger blogs. It means that you can import a blog from WordPress, LiveJournal, Typepad or any other blogging platforms. I am sure that this limitation will upset some of you. Still, you find a reason to rejoice, as you have the export feature that you can use to keep a back up copy of your blog on your hard drive. Regarding importing a blog to WordPress, we already have a cool and powerful import feature in WordPress and I love it

Finally, WordPress 2.7 is here. I’m sure that almost all bloggers using the popular blogging platform are aware of the new release. This new version of WordPress comes with a brand new interface and some other new features like automatic update. I have just upgraded my WordPress installation to 2.7 and I’m kinda loving it! The new interface is cool and navigation is fast. What you say?

Well, you might have noticed that there was no updates for almost one week on this blog. Why? Actually, I was busy in some other works and just two days ago I lost one of my good friends. So, I went to take part in the funeral. Now I am back and hope that this blog will produce some good contents in coming days! In the meantime, if you want to know more about WordPress 2.7, watch the video.

Since last month, I am busy in some case studies. One of the basic goals of the case studies is to find out how some bloggers are establishing themselves as authority in their niche. The case studies are not yet complete. But, after about 120 hours of hard work by two of my trusted men, I’m getting some interesting and useful information related to different blogs. One of such interesting information is some bloggers are easily exploiting the blogs of big media houses to make money online. How? They are getting good PageRank juices from high PR blogs of newspaper or television sites. After a bit of research, I found that it can be done by anyone and you don’t have to spend a cent for this.

How I came to know about this? During our data collection, we targeted some high PR blogs, in order to find out from where they began and how they got good PR. I am not going to include the name of the blogs here, but I can tell you that all of them have at least PR 5 on their home page and they are not related to Make Money Online niche. We found that at least ten PR5 blogs got the high PageRank only because of links from one or two different sites. After further research we found that those blogs have noting important but a bunch of scrap articles and they are making good money from interim paid postings and link sales.

I am sure that you all know how much you can make from a PR5 blog, if you go for paid reviews and text link sales. So, I looked towards the sites that are sending PR juice to those spammy high PR blogs. Except two, all of them have backlinks from blogs of big media houses (by media houses, here I mean newspapers and tv channels). The exceptional two blogs got sitewide backlinks from portal sites.

So, need a high PR? Get one or two blogroll links on blogs hosted with high PR newspaper sites. You may ask how can I say that it really works? It works, because I have contacted one of those bloggers. His name starts with ‘H’ and he blogs from India.  After two long chats via phone (one of my ex-colleague is his best friend and I took the advantages!), he told me the truth about his two PR5 blogs. He got the blogroll links from blogs related with two top newspaper sites. How did he managed to get the links? Did he paid for those links? I know this kind of questions may arise on your mind. In fact I also asked him the same questions. And his answer was - good public relation. Just like I used my ex-colleague’s friendship, he took advantage of his college mates! He was lucky enough to find some people who works in some top newspapers. He requested them to include a link to his blog, from the newly started technology blogs of those newspaper sites. That’s it he got the links without spending a cent and when the newspaper blogs got high PR, his blog’s PR also went up.

Our Mr ‘H’ got the blogroll links with just a simple request to his college mates and now he is now enjoying blogging. From online gambling to house ants and from kitty party to spyware removal, he covers all kinds of topics on his technology blogs and makes money online! He also publishes some useful links on his sidebar.

So, it really works. I can say it with confidence because I have lots of data to support this. Anyway, if you really want to make some quick money, then you may try this technique. Not sure how to start? Remember the following points:

• First decide whom you want to approach for a link. Nowadays almost every big website comes with a blog. Contact your friends and relatives. I am sure that you will be able to spot at least one who is related with a newspaper, television or a news portal.
• Look for high PR blogs related with those sites. But never ignore low PR ones. Their PR can easily go up and you can approach them when first attempt to get a backlink from high PR blogs fails.
• Create your blog on your own domain name. Get a catchy name related to a popular topic and publish some contents. If you already have an established blog, that’s great.
• Then send your request. Contact personally or via Phone and try to get a blogroll link. Never go for old style email request method and whenever required provide a backlink to his or her blog.
• Once you have the backlink(s), wait for the next Google PageRank update.
• You will definitely get a good PageRank, as search engines loves those news sites or portals.
• Join some good get paid to blog programs and start to make money from your high PR blog.

Summary: Need a good PageRank? Use your public relation and communication skills to persuade bloggers of popular media houses to add a blogroll link. With only one or two sitewide links from PR6 blogs, you can easily get PR5 on your blog.

Note: I have written this long post, based on results of my case studies. This technique is suitable only for those who wants to make money online by using all possible ways. So, if you want to make money online by implementing this idea, you must go for paid postings or sale of text links. Otherwise, I can’t guarantee that you will make enough money even with a PR5 blog.

PerformancingAds is a blog advertising network. I was a publisher of their service and I had no complaints against them until this month. During November, they abused my advertising space and displayed ads for extended period without paying me a cent. Now, I am convinced that PerformancingAds is a cheater. Here I am going to tell you what happened with me and what I think about their game.

It all started with two ad bookings on November 3, 2008. I am not going to mention the names of the advertisers here, because it will be a free publicity for them! The two ads were booked for one week. It was clearly stated in the region booked mail that they sends to it’s publishers when an ad was booked. I have original copies of the two emails and I can produce them anytime.

As each of the ads were not related to any explicit materials, I accepted them. The ads went live on specified time and I forgot about them until I saw them on my blog after ten days. First I thought, I am getting extra money for the usage. But, when I checked my account, I saw that they will pay me only for one week. And in detailed information about each ads, it is stated that they will expire on November 30. But my account reports clearly states that they were booked for one week only. Then how come they will expire after 4 weeks?  And how an ad became self-booked ad? Take a look at the screenshot below.

Sensing something fishy, I contacted them via the contact form, on November 17. Now reply for three days. Then, on November 20,  I told them via email that I will remove the ad region, unless the ads are removed from my blog. Their reply arrived quickly with a finger towards their developers! And you know what? Their reply to my first mail arrived on November 24. What a fast customer service.

They said that it was server glitch that prevented ads from refreshing, but they resolved the issue and the expired ads should disappear from my blog. I thought that at last I got some kind of a customer service! But, soon my happiness changed into anger. The same two ads again appeared on my blog.

It is enough. I made a decision to quit. These cheap people have really cheap minds. They must understand that every blogger have full rights on their blogs. And partnering with a third party for revenue doesn’t reflect that the blogger is poor and desperate for money. I have money, I have dignity and I respect my blog. So, I quit.

Finally I wrote to them that if within 24hrs they are not going to remove those ads, I will quit and will openly discuss the matter on my blog. I was sure that there will be no replies and I was right. I am not going to claim any unpaid money or money for the referrals. Let them eat my money.

You may ask, why I am writing this blog post, when I am not interested in PerformancingAds? This for you my dear friends. When it can happen with me, I am sure that it will happen with you also. Already many bloggers have expressed their anger on this service. I am sure that you have probably heard about many of them. So, this is the time. Think once again, if you are using them right now. And if you are new to this field of make money online, avoid them. Otherwise you will regret one day!

The bottom line:

“Avoid PerformancingAds. They will eat your advertising space and you will get nothing”.